With the Visitors activity, you can see a real-time list of all the visitors currently on your website. It helps summarize all visitor information at a glance, including information about their browser, operating system, location, pages visited, and referral page. This visitor information is only available for websites with the widget embedded. You cannot view a visitor's path on websites that do not have your widget added.
This article contains the following sections:
Monitoring your website visitors
The Visitors activity gives you a birds-eye view of all the visitors on your website. You can view the Visitors activity in the following ways:
- List view, which shows visitors in a list that is divided into categories.
- Visual view, which shows visitors in a heat-map style display.
List view | Visual view |
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Each visitor is placed into a category, represented by an icon (for the List view) or a color-coded dot (for the Visual view). The table below shows the icons, and the category each represents:
List icon/Visual color | Category name | Category description |
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Incoming chats | Visitors who have clicked the chat button and asked a question.Note: This only includes visitors that are in a currently signed-in agent's department. See Creating agents and departments. |
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Assigned | Visitors whose chats have been assigned to an agent. |
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Chat button clicked | Visitors who have clicked the chat button but have yet to start a chat. |
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Trigger activated | Visitors who have activated a trigger. Note: if a visitor is already in the Incoming chats category, activating a trigger will not put them in the Trigger activated category. The Incoming chats category takes precedence. |
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Currently served | Visitors who are being currently served by other agents or yourself. |
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Active website visitors | Visitors who are moving around the website and clicking on links. |
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Idle website visitors | Visitors who are currently on the site, but not interacting with it. |
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Offline visitors (Visual view only) | Visitors who have recently signed off. Reload the view to remove from the visual. |
In the List view, Each category includes a combination of the following columns, containing information about the visitor:
- Visitor: The visitor's ID.
- Online: How long the visitor has been on the website.
- Message: The most recent message left by the visitor in a chat.
- Viewing: The number of pages with the widget script the customer has visited during this session.
- Visits: How many times the visitor has been on the website in the past year.
- Chats: How many times the visitor has initiated a chat.
- Referrer: URL where the visitor's current session originated.
- Served by: Chat agent currently serving the visitor.
Grouping visitors
This is the primary view of the Visitor List, but you can also monitor them in a number of different ways:
- Activity: This is the default page and breaks down visitors based on the actions they have taken on your website.
- Page Title: Groups visitors based on the page they are on.
- Page URL: Groups visitors based on the URL/link they are on. This is normally different from the Page Title.
- Country: Groups visitors based on the country they are from. The visitor's IP address tells us which country they are from.
- Serving Agent: Groups visitors based on the agent who is serving them.
- Department: Groups visitors based on department.
- Browser: Groups visitors based on the browser they are using to access your website.
- Search Engine: If the visitors arrived at your website through a search engine (e.g. Google), they will be grouped under this category.
- Search Term: If the visitors typed in a search term to get to your website, they will be grouped in this section based on the term they used.
Using the High-Load Dashboard
If you experience higher traffic (5000 or more concurrent visitors), you can switch to the High Load Dashboard.
Unlike the standard Visitor List, the High Load Dashboard only shows Incoming and Currently Served chats.
The High Load Dashboard is available to all customers on paid plans.
To enable the High Load Dashboard
- From the dashboard, go to Settings > Account > Visitor List tab.
- Select the High Load Dashboardcheck box.
- Click Save Changes.
- Return to the dashboard and verify that only Incoming and Currently served chats appear.
12 comments
Philip Gray
Hi @..., We recently implemented Zendesk chat and were looking at the possibility of using the visitors list to initiate chats on a proactive basis. However, having just turned on agent workspace, it seems like proactive chats is no longer an option.
I was honestly surprised that the functionality that is meant to properly embed Chat into the Zendesk Support product (i.e. agent workspace) has the side-effect of disabling a key feature of the Chat product.
You mentioned in your comment 10 months ago that improving the agent workspace / visitor list situation was something that the Zendesk PMs were looking into. Do you know if there has been any progress on this? Anything on the roadmap?
At the moment, I'm faced with a choice of either running AW or being able to initiate proactive chats and that's a really unpleasant decision.
5
Trevor Piercey
Can we have an update on this please? we also just launched ZD chat (in Agent workspace) but it seems kind of pointless/ridiculous that this feature is not available to use in tandem.
i.e- being able to still contact users proactively in the dedicated Chat window, but still allowing the Agent Workspace agents to serve incoming chats.
2
Ruben
This tuto is really not clear, you don't even explain where is that visitors activity? Also how come we don't see that straight from the tickets?
0
DJ Buenavista Jr.
The following article is about Zendesk Chat. You can reach the following visitor's activity by going to the Chat product page by clicking on the Zendesk Products icon from the upper right.
After clicking on it, you will be redirected to a new page and from here you simply need to click on Visitors to view your site activity.
Thank you and have a wonderful day ahead!
Kind regards,
-1
Oliver Jackson
I'm trialling Zendesk Chat, but I never see any visitors appear, even though we know we have some (e.g. I asked the whole team to go to the page). Nothing even appears as Clicked when I test this. It only shows when a visitor has been Assigned and Served.
Surely there should be some listed as Idle or Active at least?
0
Dane
The behavior you are currently experiencing is a limitation of the Chat Dashboard when you are using Agent Workspace. It will only show the total number of visitors but not the visitor information. Only ongoing conversations are shown in the Dashboard. More information can be found in Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
0
Вячеслав Скорбеж
Are there plans to add this functionality to the Messaging and SunCo web widgets?
1
Aukse
Hi, i don't have VISITORS in my Zendesk chat.
I have home and team. Any suggestions? Web widget is enabled on a shopify website.
0
Anne Ronalter
this is expected behaviour for newer accounts.
If this is needed for your workflow, please create a ticket for our Support, so that we can work on it with our developers.
0
Adriano Capitanelli
If visitors - visual view is not working for messaging, what can be used instead?
0
Gabriel Manlapig
Using the new Agent Workspaces, one of these limitations is that the Chat dashboard will not be able to display a detailed visualization of your active visitors, like you were able to see previously.
Only ongoing conversations are shown in the Dashboard. More information can be found in Limitations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
I encourage you to create a new post in the General Product Feedback topic in our community to engage with other users who have similar needs and discuss possible workarounds. Conversations with a high level of engagement ultimately get flagged for product managers to review when they go through roadmap planning. Thank you!
-1
Support
This feature drop has me evaluating freshdesk in what world is this acceptable to stop supporting such a key feature and I was migrated from legacy without authority this is a support product and it stops showing online visitors in favour of tickets!!! Not happy
1